Kate Douglas is our guest today. Welcome, Kate! Thanks to Joyce for the invitation to blog--I love the topic. Believe me, with a twenty-year history of rejections between my first submission to my first New York contract, I needed all the advice and pithy sayings I could get to keep me going! But here I am, fresh off the release of DemonFire, my first mass market in my new paranormal romance series from Kensington Zebra, awaiting the imminent release (March 30) of the eighteenth book (that's counting novels and anthologies) in my Wolf Tales series, (Sexy Beast VIII-Chanku Spirit) and working on a proposal for a new project I'm planning to have my agent pitch to my editor.
So finally, after a long and frustrating career as an "aspiring" author, I can finally say, "Yep, I are one now. Really!" So, what'd it take to keep this old broad plugging along, writing, revising, submitting, dealing with rejections, rewriting, submitting again, ad nauseum?
It took friends who encouraged me, editors who kept asking me to send something else even as they rejected the stories I HAD sent, and an inborn stubbornness that probably drove my parents nuts but kept me focused on my goal of publication. I'm going to share some of the things that have stuck with me, words of wisdom I've heard from other writers, now published, who understood the frustration of rejection, the joy of writing, and the voices that wouldn't let go of me until I sat down and wrote the words.
Writers write. Sounds pretty simple, but it's so damned true it hurts. Writing isn't merely what we do, it's what we are. So many of us are defined by our words, by the stories we tell. When friends question why we keep at it in the face of rejections, it's impossible to make them understand the truth-writers write. They can't NOT write. They just do it.
My world, my rules. I love this one. Don't let ANYONE tell you there are rules you have to follow when you write your stories. You are the one in charge-you are the one hearing the voices, listening to the muse, writing the words. If you want to write in first person, do it. If your hero doesn't fit the "hero mold," tough shit. Write him the way you see him. One of my books has a food critic with sexual identity issues. When my agent submitted the book to Harlequin, the editor said she loved my kick-ass heroine, but wanted me to tone her down, and the hero would be much better as a cowboy. Huh? I sold Last of the O'Rourkes to an epublisher and it went on to get wonderful reviews and even win a couple of nice awards. My world, my rules, and Seamus O'Rourke was a great food critic-and Kat Malone could easily kick his ass.
Make it work. Get it done. It's all about the book. I actually have this one printed out and hanging on my wall. It's a reminder to keep my priorities in order.
Write your own story. Don't write what you think an editor wants. Don't write what you think the public wants. Do not write the book your critique partners or group thinks you need to write-write the book YOU have to write, and when you write it, own it. Believe in it, be involved in it from the inside out until you know that book, those characters, that setting as if everything about the story is real. If it's not real for you, how can you expect it to be real for your readers?
When I first wrote Wolf Tales in 2005, the series was at the request of Margaret Riley, who was opening up a new epub called Changeling Press. She wanted something hot and unusual to launch her new venture, and asked me to write a series of 12,000 or so word stories that would 'blow their socks off.' Margaret envisioned short books that readers could read on their PDAs or other small electronic devices-so I started writing, one episode at a time, and Wolf Tales was born. In the beginning, there was no real plan, other than to push boundaries and break all the "rules" I could think of. I developed my world of Chanku shapeshifters and their mythology sort of grew with each story I wrote. My agent read the first five stories and passed them on to Audrey LaFehr at Kensington Publishing, who loved the concept but had no line where they would fit.
That's how Kensington's Aphrodisia imprint came about-on the strength of five short stories that belonged to an epublisher. Margaret generously returned my rights and I signed a contract for three novels and three novellas-all those shorts made up the first book, but I had absolutely no idea what was coming next. I still write the stories the same way-no plan, no real idea, just a gut-level knowledge of my characters. This was my story from the beginning, something I wrote for a friend, but also to please myself. All those years of rejection, and yet it was the first project that was written totally without any plan of going after a NY contract that got me that contract.
Go figure. There's a huge lesson in there somewhere.
So here I am, age sixty, grandmother of five, married to the same amazingly patient spouse who had to listen to me moan and groan for YEARS over all those rejections, and I'm gearing up for the release of my eighteenth book in March, my nineteenth in July and the twentieth and twenty-first in September. (Yep, two in one month-I've been busy.) And that's not even counting the epubbed/small press books I sold before I hit New York. So yes, if it happened for me, it can happen for you, but not if you don't follow my final words of "old broad" wisdom.I saved the most important advice I ever got, for last. Never, ever give up. Keep writing, keep learning your craft, keep at it. If you don't write it, you can't sell it. But even if you never sell a book, you will have left behind a legacy of dreams and the stories that lived in your heart and soul. That, even without the contract, is something most people never even come close to, and for that reason alone, never, ever give up.
Kate Douglas
http://www.katedouglas.com/
www.facebook.com/katedouglas.author
